It was a year of seismic change in several of Britain's ballet companies, and
of bold collaborations across the dance spectrum

Anyone returning to Britain this week from a year on (say) the moon, and glancing at our inevitably Nutcracker-filled dance schedules, might be forgiven for thinking that this had been an uneventful year forballet. In fact, it was one of seismic change.

Scottish Ballet got off lightly, you could say, losing “only” its artistic director. After 10 immensely effective years there, Ashley Page was offered just one year’s extension to his contract: he stood down, head held high, with choreographer and former English National Ballet soloist Christopher Hampson now charged with building on Page’s sterling work at this nimble company.

With near-Wildean carelessness, ENB meanwhile managed to lose both its chief executive, Craig Hassall, and artistic director, Wayne Eagling. Eagling has had his critics over the years – some perhaps justified, to judge by the frantic cobbling together of his 2010 Nutcracker – but he left behind him a strong and glamorous company, with a handful of excellent pieces that bear his signature. Hardly a failure, then.

Even that double-whammy, however, was barely a scratch compared to events at Covent Garden. First, in January, Sergei Polunin, youngest ever male principal with the Royal Ballet, flounced miserably out of the company; too much too soon, it seemed. Then, just as Britain’s pre-eminent troupe was steadying itself after that bracing uppercut, Tamara Rojo – dance-partner to Carlos Acosta, and herself one of the greatest ballet artists of the modern age – landed a full-on haymaker: come the autumn, she would also be leaving, to fill Eagling’s shoes at ENB in a new dancer-director role.

Powerful: Sergei Polunin in mid-flight

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In July, Monica Mason made her long-planned retirement after 10 dedicated years as the Royal Ballet’s director and a full 54 years’ involvement with the company. But what no one saw coming was the news last month that the Royal Opera House’s chief executive, Tony Hall, would soon take over as director general of the BBC in the wake of George Entwistle’s sudden departure. (The Covent Garden post remains open, in case any readers happen to be brilliant administrators, gifted diplomats and insatiable masochists.)

Mason’s decade in charge of the Royal Ballet will, admittedly, be remembered as a more curatorial than creative one. But she unquestionably restored the company’s spirit and standing after the disastrous Ross Stretton administration before her, and she kept standards high in most respects. She passed on to the well-liked new director, Kevin O’Hare, a company in generally rude health, if one with a worrying shortage of rising stars. Two challenges there for O’Hare, who, to his credit, has already managed to lure both Polunin and Rojo back in guest-principal roles, along with the ravishing Bolshoi alumna Natalia Osipova. He also now has a talented trio of resident choreographers – Wayne McGregor, Christopher Wheeldon and Liam Scarlett – on site: it will be fascinating to see how this triumvirate works out, especially after the mixed form they all found this year.

Mason made her departure back in July, with the triple bill Metamorphosis: Titian 2012, a bells-and-whistles tie-in with the National Gallery involving three leading modern composers, three stars of contemporary art and no fewer than seven choreographers. The profound wellspring of affection for the serene South African led, I think, most critics to give this visually stunning but immensely uneven swansong a rather easy ride. Only one of its pieces – Diana and Actaeon, designed with kaleidoscopic, retina-bursting brio by Chris Ofili – hit the spot, and even that is conspicuously absent from any forthcoming schedules. Still, hats off to all concerned for trying, and my, Marianela Nuñez – in some ways now the Royal Ballet’s queen bee – made a fearsome huntress.

This was, in fact, a year of unusually ambitious collaborations. Part of the London 2012 Festival, Dance GB saw ENB, Scottish Ballet and National Dance Company Wales team up, for an Olympics-inspired triptych of new pieces. Fascinatingly, it was little NDCW that emerged as the Usain Bolt of the three, thanks both to director Ann Sholem’s canniness in getting a big-name choreographer, Christopher Bruce, and to Bruce himself, who more than delivered the goods in his charming Dream.

As it happens, ENB stuck its neck out laudably often, albeit with variable results. In February, it brought ballet to the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain; the following month, its new Firebird proved more of a lame old pigeon, though its shimmering recreation of Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un faune largely compensated.

In June, the company also teamed up with body-poppers Flawless for Against Time. This turned out to be a fairly hopeless modern fairy tale, achieving little significant symbiosis between ballet and hip hop. But it was full of joy, and it gave vast young crowds what must have been their first ever sighting of the lustrous ENB corps – no bad thing.

The year began with the most eccentric collaboration of all. Brighton-based Hofesh Shechter – the Kubrick-fancying, existentially preoccupied rock god of contemporary dance – teamed up with that most corporeally obsessed of sculptors, Antony Gormley, for Survivor. They hollowed out the Barbican stage, got up to all sorts of mischief and rather tied themselves in knots. But there were some stunning moments, and three cheers for such open-ended experimentation.

Also in the contemporary arena, it was heartening to see Rambert’s dancers not only performing sizzlingly well (as ever) but also being given work worthy of them. Their chiefly retrospective bill this autumn offered plenty to get one’s teeth into, while Rambert boss Mark Baldwin’s What Wild Ecstasy, back in May, proved an orgiastic and very welcome new addition to the company’s rep.

But 2012’s biggest event in contemporary dance came from overseas. Three years after the death of its founder and leading light, Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch gave London a three-week revival of its 10-part global tour, World Cities. Many observers were enraptured; the pieces I saw mostly struck me as touristy, repetitive, wildly overlong and, despite Bausch’s best efforts, woefully unfunny. How much better she is when – as in her Rite of Spring – she plunges face-first into the abyss.

Still, at least Bausch always tried to engage. Last month at Sadler’s, another northern-European expressionist, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, twice provided the grim spectacle of a choreographer disappearing joylessly and self-importantly up her own fundament. Her two shows En Atendant and Cesena were awful in themselves; all the more so for the possibility that young dance-makers might regard this sort of pointlessly acetic, wilfully obscure, emperor’s-new-clothes claptrap as worth emulating.

The year’s greatest down-with-all-hands disaster, however, came in the realm of ballet, and in the form of Peter Schaufuss’s first British staging of his 1997 Tchaikovsky Trilogy. A revisionist project so awful it came close to defying description, this took the fillet steak of Tchaikovsky, Ivanov and Petipa, and churned it into a kind of rancid novelty hamburger, criminally under-using the magnificent dancer Irek Mukhamedov in the process. Vastly superior – if some way from his best work – is the great Matthew Bourne’s impishly vampiric new take on Sleeping Beauty (still on), and yet the year’s best Tchaikovsky-Petipa adaptation was arguably the most traditional: Birmingham Royal Ballet’s recent, glorious revival of Peter Wright’s Swan Lake reminded one just how powerful the 19th-century classics can be in the right hands.

My regret of the year is not having caught Alexei Ratmansky’s Cinderella, with the Mariinsky, in Edinburgh, even though sightings there of Brazil’s Deborah Colker (sensitively adapting Pushkin in Tatyana) and those Russian sorcerers Derevo (slathering themselves in watermelon and sausage meat in Mephisto Waltz) sugared the pill.

It was also sad to see London’s Dance Umbrella suffering in the wake of the Arts Council’s grant cuts, not to mention the Government’s plans to exclude cultural subjects from the English baccalaureate: who needs a stimulating music-and-movement curriculum when we’ve got Strictly Come Dancing, right guys?

In a happier vein, my no-contest, solid-gold highlight of the year was Michael Clark Company’s exhilarating show at the Barbican in October with former Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, a beautiful, deranged, pitch-perfect evening of balletically infused modernity. In two impeccably taut halves of just 25 minutes, New Work 2012 was also a testament to Clark’s capacity for self-editing, among the rarest and most cherishable skills in contemporary dance.